I love trading and being a market tycoon (Freelancer changed my life BTW) and I'm just wondering what the market in SC will be like. Will the market carry most/all items in the game? Will prices be player driven? Can players only make profit by transporting goods to another system or can they buy low/sell high right where they are?asked by Hux1ey

So the market and what's available will depend on what people want to sell and what people want to buy on each different planet/landing location/city. It'll be very unlikely that everything will be available in all places, in fact that definitely won't happen. Some bigger places like Earth/Terra will probably have a wider selection, places like Earth probably have a lot of demand for manufactured things, but much of that manufacturing will have moved off-planet. Terra is probably similar but has more manufacturing capability etc. One of the keys to trading in SC is buying or making stuff and taking that to a place that might need it to sell higher. I want to enforce the mechanic that makes you fly around and visit the universe, so you won't be able to get every thing at any store, so there might be a really great manufacturer of ballistic weapons at this one particular planet, you'll have to go there to get that brand. Perhaps there's a business opportunity in buying a lot from that place and maybe selling them on a place like Terra, where prices would be higher. The economy will be partially player driven, so if you DO buy a lot of these weapons and sell them on Terra as the supply increases and demand is satisfied prices will change to be lower to reflect that. So there will be an effect of player actions on the economy, it won't be OVERBOARD, we have a large universe simulated with millions of NPCs and the player base will be a portion of that, so there's no way (hopefully) that players could completely unbalance the market, as the plan is for them to make up about 10% of the market where the rest is AI. So a large enough portion that they will definitely be able to affect local economies/prices. Generally you'd have to transport stuff to another system to turn a reliable profit, though that doesn't mean you'd have to do it yourself necessarily, you could hire another person or NPC to do it for you and just stay on a planet and run a trading empire without going anywhere, but probably a little boring.